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Article Excerpt
I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for "bread," "bread," and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism.... My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for settling the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.--Cecil Rhodes, 1895 (cited in Robbins, 1999: 93-94).
THIS STATEMENT STARKLY SUMS UP THE ECONOMIC IMPERATIVE OF LATE BRITISH imperialism. It sets out a perspective that was no doubt related to Rhodes' personal role in British colonial expansion. As the founder of the British South African Trading Company (and co-founder of the De Beers diamond company), he obtained a British government charter that empowered the company to form armies and police forces to capture large parts of central Southern Africa with the aim of securing concessions for land and mineral rights. His colonial mission was, explicitly and directly, to expropriate and brutally suppress local populations for profit. Underpinning the mission was a belief in the cultural supremacy of the "Anglo-Saxon race," and Rhodes (1877) argued that British imperialism was necessary to spread what he regarded as "the best, the most human, most honourable race the world possesses." Rhodes' colonial mission illustrates the close correspondence between the racism at the heart of the British Empire and the interests of the private profiteers in the form of the colonial corporations and the traders and merchants that prospered from British military dominance.
A combination of economic and cultural-racial supremacy underpins all forms of imperialism. Rarely is it represented as explicitly as it is in Rhodes' cherished idea. Imperial powers have tended to sugar the pill of colonial domination with the promise of social advancement or humanitarian assistance. Although the British historically laid claim to a "civilizing mission," U.S. imperialism during the Cold War more crudely promised "liberation" through the opening up of "free markets" (legitimized by a generalized defense of human rights, of liberal democracy, etc.). The racist and economically egotistical motives of Empire (the economic subordination of populations, the capture of resources, and the development of markets) are typically masked by the promise of the cultural/social/political advantages for subordinate populations. Thus, techniques of neocolonialism that emerged in the 20th century sought to discipline and control populations with the promise of economic incorporation or the threat of economic exclusion. More recently, the legitimating narrative for U.S. imperialist military interventions has been constructed around a doctrine of preemption/prevention in which "axis of evil" states represent a legitimate target for reasons of the "liberation" of their people and for a much more nakedly egotistical defense of U.S. national interests.
This article will explore how the current U.S. imperial project combines an increasingly naked economic rationale with a more overt nationalist one. It will point to the ideological mobilization of "market patriotism," which is welding notions of "national security" and the "national interest" to the (neoliberal) market. "Market patriotism" is emerging to play an increasingly important role in engineering political legitimacy for the mobilization of the coercive apparatuses of the state domestically and internationally under conditions of a so-called war on terror.
Legitimizing Capitalist Social Orders
The securing of political legitimacy is a complex process in which the battle for ideas, in a Gramscian, sense, is related to underlying struggles between social classes or competing power blocs. The process of building ideological hegemony involves the dominant social group making a bid to have a view of the world, set of beliefs and morals, or "system of ideas" gain widespread acceptance throughout civil society (social institutions such as the political parties, churches, NGOs, trade unions, and so on) (Gramsci, 1996). This does not necessarily mean that the construction of one "worldview" inevitably predominates over all others. There is room for difference, or for a plurality of ideas. The effect of ideological hegemony is to ensure that a "plurality of ideas" can be defined within certain parameters. Thus, although this process may have the appearance of an open and "democratic" one that encourages debate, ultimately such debates are conducted within boundaries of what may be deemed "acceptable" or "legitimate." In this sense, ideology can be understood as the cement of a society--a force that binds and reinforces social organization under capitalism (Poulantzas, 1978).
For Gramsci, the development of ideological hegemony is always grounded in the material realities of human social relations. In other words, ideas do not develop independently from inter- and intra-class struggles for power. As the dominant ideas of a society are promoted, disseminated, and reproduced, they reach popular consciousness through a variety of means (not least through the institutions of civil society such as trade associations, educational institutions, churches, etc.). When these ideas are broadly accepted by the populous, they become "common sense." That is, the aim of ruling groups in any given society is to establish their ideas, no matter how flawed, as an accurate view of the world such that they acquire the status of accepted "truths" or "realities." Ruling groups then use those ideas as a resource to seek consensual support for political rule. Political rule in capitalist social orders uses a mix of ideological hegemony (consent) and force (coercion). There is not a zero sum relationship between the two forms of power, but a more complex dialectical interplay. It is misleading to project a rise or fall of consensual forms of rule that correlates directly to an intensification or weakening of coercive techniques to which governments resort. Instead, ideological mechanisms adapt to the conditions required by a particular form of political rule. If political rule becomes more coercive, the result is not that consent automatically diminishes, but that the ideas disseminated by the ruling bloc must adapt to support and stabilize those coercive forms of power.
An often overlooked point about the Gramscian notion of hegemony by those who describe the current period as an "era of globalization" is that despite the emergence of new locations of inter- and trans-national decision-making, and despite the extension of political rule through transnational institutions such as the various United Nations organizations, international financial institutions (IFIs), and the World Trade Organization (WTO), in liberal democracies ideological hegemony remains a process that requires an understanding of the extent to which the nation-state is the starting point and the point of departure for understanding how hegemony operates internationally (Showstack Sasoon, 2001). The mechanisms through which state power operates (elected parliaments, administrative centers of power, legal apparatuses, police forces, military units, mass media, etc.) and the loci for the constitution of capital (trade associations, stock markets, regulatory mechanisms) remain organized at the level of national states and remain significant for organizing a national, collective project. This is the case in spite of the intense pressures from above and below experienced in the current period of late capitalism, not least formations at an international level that are capable of organizing ruling fractions. Thus, no matter how much the exigencies of the global market discipline states, this does not obliterate the fact that the struggle for hegemony is a process of political rule located at the level of the national state.
In this context, although securing popular consent generally involves some form of hegemonic compromise, the borders of a particular nation-state do not always strictly limit the process. Thus, universalist forms of reasoning, rooted in liberal political theory and philosophy, have provided key ideological supports for capitalism, proposing that it will yield political and economic benefits for all, regardless of "nation" or "race." Both "particularist" and "universalist" claims are always present in capitalist social orders. Thus, contemporary Western governments characteristically make the (particularist) claim that neoliberal policies will improve the competitiveness of the national economy--and therefore benefit the population within a particular nation-state--while making the (universalist) claim that neoliberalism can, on a global level, create the conditions for other, weaker economies to become stronger.
The End of Liberal Universalism?
Three central universalist principles have historically been important in a hegemonic sense for providing ideological support for capitalist social orders. First, classical justifications for capitalist social orders have been rooted in a universal prosperity rationale, such that the general wealth of society is improved by facilitating the creation of wealth....
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